Thursday, July 24, 2008

GLXP and NOAA, Art, Florida, Florida, and More

White Label Space, a GLXP team in formation, posts on the ICPF Contest, a simulated rover control software contest. Instead of pretending it's a Mars rover with instantaneous communication with Earth, the ICPF might have pretended it's a GLXP rover and just ignored the time delay ...

WLS also posts on the first art exhibition in outer space. The art is miniaturized to 1mm squares. I could see a similar strategy working for GLXP teams wanting to send the first art exhibition to the Moon, or sponsor decals for that matter.

The X PRIZE Foundation's Launch Pad blog has a lot of information-filled posts today. One is on a discussion with NOAA officials about NOAA Earth imaging regulations (I suspect originally written with intelligence agency concerns in mind, not lunar-distance imaging) that GLXP teams with U.S. members should be aware of. Another includes Will interviewing Team STELLAR's Jeff Krukin. They also note that Space Florida is encouraging people in Florida with the idea of forming a new team with an event at the Kennedy Space Center on August 1. Show up and you might with a Zero-G ride! Finally, they meet at a Google office and send a call for German translation of a GLXP article.

Meanwhile, LunaTrex posts a question on blogging that results in some interesting comments. I've noticed that some competitions tend to have lots of teams that post information and even help each other, while others tend to have teams that wait for the big event to reveal their plans.